it's a failing lock-in to standardise web articles along the lines best suited to Google's bottom line. They conned - convinced sorry - a load of publishers to take it on a while back, but they're increasingly leaving it due to the total lack of control they have over their right to profit from their efforts.

its fucking shit - google's attempt to hijack/control the web for itself, dressed up as being helpful to the mobile browser. it seems to put every page into a google frame, presumably to help them spam you with ads.

With shit like this and Google/YouTube serving up malicious JS advertising, I think we're going to reach a schism/choke point over the next couple of years where the eternal fight waged between content-makers and advertisers is concerned.

I have no idea how it will play out, but I would recommend everyone installs ad blockers on their browsers (and tries to pay/support content they do use otherwise).

It was, however, a grave danger to Google's core business — advertising. RSS served content stripped off ads. Horrible.

It had to be dealt with and Google did a brilliant job with it. They literally killed off RSS without anyone noticing and attributing it to them. After all these years, I'm still impressed.

They first contained the spreading RSS disease by offering a free RSS reader, effectively killing off all alternative paid RSS readers. It's hard to compete with free and ubiquitous.

Soon enough, most RSS users used Google Reader to aggregate their news feeds. For a couple of years, RSS became nearly synonymous with Google Reader.

In the next, long phase, through slow neglect, lack of feature and UX updates the Reader became more and more dated and useless. Alongside with it, so did RSS. Google got the users disinterested in that way of receiving news. People were tired of waiting for a big update to happen. Or any update for that matter.

At one point Google announced they weren't continuing on with the development of Google Reader and were shutting it down.

For most people this was just another app on Google graveyard. Hardly anyone noticed, it was RSS that was actually being pronounced dead.